The present invention relates to an image processing system, an image processing method and an object name generation program, and specifically relates to the image processing system, the image processing method and the object name generation program, each of which reuses an object.
In recent years, there have been increasingly proliferated in the market various kinds of printing apparatuses, such as a printer, a Multi Function Peripheral (MFP), etc., (hereinafter, referred to as an image forming apparatus as a general term for each of them). When an image forming apparatus is employed for conducting a printing operation, the image forming apparatus parses concerned print data written in the Page Description Language and applies the bitmap developing processing (rasterizing operation) to the print data for every page so as to create image data, and then, implements the printing operation based on the image data created.
In this connection, it is no need to repeatedly create image data for every print product when producing plural copies of the print products in the normal printing mode; however, it is necessary to conduct the rasterizing operation for every print product so as to create the image data, in a case where the printing operation is conducted with changing the objects (contents), such as character contents, image contents, etc., sequentially (generally speaking, this printing mode is called the “variable printing”). Accordingly, since the process of the rasterizing operation requires much time, there has been arisen such a problem that the processing efficiency of the system concerned has deteriorated as a whole.
To solve the abovementioned problem, there has been employed such a method for improving the processing efficiency in which: the objects (contents) to be assigned to each of the pages are classified into those to be employed only once within a single print job, and those to be repeatedly employed within the single print job (hereinafter, referred to as reusable objects); the reusable objects are rasterized so as to store the created image data into a cache memory; and reusing the image data of the reusable objects stored in the cache memory (for instance, set forth in Japanese Non-Examined Laid-Open Patent Publication No. 2006-243816).
In this connection, at the time when reusing the object, if no rasterized object that linked with the object name concerned can be found, the reusing operation is determined as an “error state”. Conventionally, to avoid this error, such a superficial name as a “File 1” (a simple name for the purpose of discriminating the concerned object from other objects) is attached to the object so as to distinguish the concerned object from other objects.
However, since it is impossible to appreciate the contents of the object only by using the superficial name, an erroneous printing may occur due to an incorrect selection of an object other than the object intended by the user, in such a case where plural objects have the same name but are different from each other in resolutions and/or clipping areas, or in a case where they have the same resolution and the same image size but are different from each other in color modes, or the like.
Accordingly, according to the conventional method to solve the problem of the object selecting error mentioned in the above, an effective range is established for each of the objects, so as to make it possible to reuse each of them only within the effective range established. When the effective range is established for an object, however, there arises another problem that it is impossible to effectively reuse the object stored in the cache memory. For instance, in the printer A, even in such a case that, after object 1 has been used in print job 1, the same object 1 is to be used in print job 2 next to print job 1, object 1 should be rasterized again in print job 2.